


welcome to the panic room (where all your darkest fears are gonna come for you)

by yeeharley



Category: Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, LIKE ITS THERE, Nightmares, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Not Spider-Man: Far From Home Compliant, Panic Attacks, Peter Parker Has Issues, Peter Parker has PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Temporary Character Death, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Tony Stark Lives, Trauma, Whump, at the end i mean, but you know me, mental health, so its mainly angst! yay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-16
Updated: 2020-01-16
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:28:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22244854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yeeharley/pseuds/yeeharley
Summary: That's it. He's going insane. Whatever's going on in front of him is nothing but an illusion- a hallucination. Not-Tony isn't really there, he's just a product of wishful thinking and too many hours spent daydreaming.Peter closes his eyes tightly against the stinging of his eyes before opening them again, fully expecting Not-Tony to have disappeared. But, no, he's still there. Sitting on the couch with a growing puddle of coffee at his feet."May?" Peter says, hating the way his voice cracks. "May, I need to see a therapist."The tears spill over as Not-Tony raises a hand to his mouth and pushes his sunglasses to his forehead, revealing horrified eyes. They're exactly like the real Tony's had looked- in fact, everything about Not-Tony is exactly the same as real Tony.It's not him.(Peter Parker's mental health took a dive when he learned that his parents weren't coming home. It never stopped dropping. Tony doesn't find out how bad things are until, after his revival, Peter refuses to recognize who he is.)
Relationships: Peter Parker & May Parker, Peter Parker & Michelle Jones, Peter Parker & Ned Leeds, Peter Parker & Tony Stark, Peter parker & Ned Leeds & Michelle Jones
Comments: 38
Kudos: 464





	welcome to the panic room (where all your darkest fears are gonna come for you)

**Author's Note:**

> And I'm back in full force, lovelies. Check out my tumblr and yell at me over there. Send me ideas. Tell me about your pets. 
> 
> Thank you all for the constant support, as usual!
> 
> Title from Panic Room by Au/Ra  
> My tumblr: [silver-bubbles](https://silver-bubbles.tumblr.com/)

Pain isn't always physical- Peter knows that just as well as anybody. Sure, physical pain can be a serious motivator, an incentive, even, but he knows the _real_ motivator. It's what gets him out of bed in the morning, gets May into her car and to her job, gets Tony to his lab with his sixth cup of coffee.

Yeah, mental pain is the real mover-and-shaker.

Peter _also_ knows that everybody deals with it at one point. In this time, in these situations, anxiety and depression run rampant in the vast majority of the people he knows. Tony has an insanely high level of PTSD from his time in Afganistan, from the wormhole, from Ultron, from Thanos- pretty much every battle he's ever been in forces him further and further into an anxiety-fueled high-stress machine.

And then there's Peter, with trauma that pales in comparison with everything that his teammates and friends have been through. Comparison isn't even the right word- everything that haunts him in his dreams is nothing.

It's nothing, nothing, _nothing._

Tony- _valid._

Rhodey- _valid._

May- _valid._

Peter has nothing to complain about.

〄

His story starts, like all others, with a beginning. Four-year-old Peter Parker lives with his parents, Mary Fitzpatrick and Richard Parker, in an apartment in New York. Mary is a researcher, focused on a field of science that Peter has no recollection of. Richard is a scientist and businessman who sells his work to larger companies for profit. They're happy for those first four years, the perfect family, a child and two parents and a stupid cat named Fluff who dies only days after Peter's parents.

This is what Peter remembers.

He remembers sitting in the back of a taxi, sandwiched between his mother and father. A little stuffed rabbit is clutched in his fat fists and Mary holds an apple juice box to his lips. Richard reads through a manilla file, carefully holding it so that the car's other occupants can't see its contents. Peter plays with the satin inside of the rabbit's ear, rubbing it between his short fingers, and stares at the tree-shaped air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror.

He remembers getting out at a large building that he now knows to be the airport and stepping out of the car, holding his arms out and being picked up by Richard. He can see everything from his father's grip, from the luggage check to the waiting area to the distant security checkpoints. Little Peter sticks his thumb in his mouth and grips his father's shoulder, looking around with wide eyes as he takes in a new place and new people.

He remembers another couple- a man and a woman that he hasn't met before- meeting them in the Starbucks, where everything smells like roasted coffee beans. Peter wrinkles his nose and buries it in Richard's shoulder while his parents talk to the new people. The other woman, younger than his mother, with shiny brown hair and a pair of circular glasses, smiles at him as he catches her eye before hiding his face again. 

He remembers being passed off to the man, who's already lost most of the hair on top of his head despite his face being mostly unwrinkled, and crying for his parents in the middle of a long hallway. His mother hugs him, red hair smelling like the flowers that she grows in their window boxes, and presses a kiss to his forehead before stepping back. His father does the same, tugging his ear with a good-natured grin.

He remembers wailing and reaching out as Mary Fitzpatrick and Richard Parker walk away, suitcases trailing behind them, waving good-bye for what they don't know is the last time.

He remembers how the new man and woman, who turn out to be his Uncle Ben and his Aunt May, take him back to a studio apartment in Manhattan and set him up in their guest bedroom. The twin bed in the corner is outfitted with dinosaur sheets and there's a light-up globe on a desk that Peter can reach. Once he gets over his parents leaving, he spends hours in the room, twirling the globe around and around and trying to pronounce the fancy names written next to the stars and the dots and the lines. Peter likes the dinosaurs and the globe and how all of his clothes are already in the dresser and how May and Ben help him reach things when he needs them.

Peter remembers the day that he's come to think of as the divider between light and dark, childhood and growing up. May comes into his room, tears rolling down her face, Ben trailing behind her with bloodshot eyes. They sit him down on his bed, one perched on each side of him- just like his parents had been in the taxi- and tell him the bad news.

_Mommy and Daddy aren't coming home_.

This is where the story begins.

〄

In Peter's fourth grade language arts class, he learns about story steps. There's the exposition, the rising action, the climax, the falling action, and the resolution. A good story has one main conflict and several subplots and smaller conflicts along the way, but they always end happily and the hero gets to live out his or her life in peace and happiness, because they've done their part and their fight is over now.

His teacher tells him that a good author doesn't hurt the main character too badly, because then the readers get frustrated. _It's not realistic,_ he says, _to put them through so much for no gain in the end_. _The audience doesn't like it when there isn't a happy ending._

Peter would be a terrible author. Now that he thinks of it, he'd be a terrible protagonist, too. 

In terms of story steps, the 'rising action' is Ben. 

Ben teaches him to ride a bike in the empty backstreets of Queens when he cries about kids at school teasing him but he can't ride it on his own street for fear of being hit by a car.

Ben helps him with his homework as math gets progressively harder and one hour of work after school turns into sobbing over equations at nine o'clock at night.

Ben holds him when he's crying.

Ben helps him smuggle May's terrible cooking into the trash can without offending her before ordering Chinese. He comforts May when she finds the food in the trash and orders her favorite food and they all eat together on the floor in the living room. He lets Peter watch sitcoms that are _probably_ a little bit too old for him and they laugh and laugh and _laugh_ until May comes out of her room to find out what's wrong and busts them for it before sitting beside them and pressing play.

Ben holds him while he vomits in the bathroom after being bitten by a spider on a field trip to Oscorp, even though Peter never tells him.

Ben is there for Peter because Richard and Mary can't be, and for ten years, everything is okay. 

And then it's not.

Peter can't remember how it starts or why he does it. All he knows is that it's a Friday night and, when Ben gets home, they start to fight about something. He can't remember what it was or how it started, who initiated it, but he knows that there are tears and there's shouting and he gets so overwhelmed that he has to leave.

He knows that he doesn't tell anyone that he's leaving.

And of course, he vividly remembers holding Ben as he lies on blood-slick concrete in front of the flickering neon lights of a 7/11, sobbing and telling him not to go because _dammit_ , Ben and May are _all he has_. 

Someone calls nine-one-one.

The ambulance arrives late.

And the rising action reaches its end.

〄

The climax of Peter's story is simple and clear- Spider-Man. He takes on his alter ego when he realizes that, after what the spider had done to him, he could've saved Ben. The guilt consumes him for three days. He doesn't leave his room, doesn't open his window, doesn't eat, and drinks out of the sink in the bathroom. May doesn't see him for _three days_ , because she's mourning too, and has more to think about than the kid that she was forced to adopt. The nephew whose blood she doesn't share.

And then he gets to work.

Spider-Man is born of tears and hours of hard work and Youtube sewing tutorials, because the only thing Peter knows about needles is which end the string is supposed to go into. He sifts through rows of clothing in thrift shops to try and spend the least amount of May's money he can.

And, on one fateful Sunday evening, Spider-Man makes his first appearance.

〄

Tony Stark shows up six months later, when Peter's already gotten into the swing (ha, get it?) of things. He doesn't come when Ben is bleeding out in the streets or when Peter has to sew himself up at one in the morning with his school belt clenched between his teeth to avoid waking May. He doesn't come when nightmares overtake his sleep and spill into his mornings.

No, Tony Stark comes when _he_ needs help, and that almost blow's Peter's super-fanboy brain.

Tony Stark ( _freaking Iron Man, what the hell_ ) takes him to _Germany_ to fight _Captain America_ , someone he's only ever seen on his gym teacher's television or in detention. He tells May it's an internship and gets him a plane ticket and pays for a _hotel_. The room is huge, bigger than both of Peter's apartments combined. The couches are white and the corners are sharp and every wall is covered in modern art. It's so impersonal that Peter's afraid to touch anything, lest he breaks it.

Tony picks him up and drives him to the parking lot of an airport in Leipzig, where the rest of their team is waiting- James Rhodes, the Vision, Black Panther, and Black Widow. Peter stands among heroes, among _legends,_ and can't help but think that he has no right to be there.

He doesn't, really.

And then they fight, and Peter is so out of his league that it's _annoying_ , and he's wrestling with the Winter Soldier and the Falcon and all these war heroes that he's read about in his history class. Captain America drops a loading bay on his shoulders and leaves him to hold it by himself. The Winter Soldier almost breaks his nose. Hawkeye almost shoots him. Scarlet Witch throws cars all over the place and almost buries Tony. Someone he doesn't know about grows to the size of a small building and goes on a destructive spree that only stops when Peter webs up his legs and takes a backhand to the chest.

Tony says he's done, and Peter listens, because _God_. He is _so_ outmatched and overwhelmed here.

Happy Hogan picks him up and takes him home. Tony disappears in Siberia. Peter goes back to normal life.

_There's something different about him, though._

〄

The climax, also known as the _turning point_ , is normally the part of the story where everything starts to go uphill for the hero and the road to victory evens out. At least, that's what he's been told.

For Peter, the climax is the part of the story where everything starts to fall apart in an unstoppable force of action.

A man with metal wings terrorizes suburban neighborhoods and distributes dangerous alien weapons to small-time criminals.

Mister Delmar's bodega burns down in a flash of purple light, and Peter can't stop it.

The elevator falls. He catches it and nearly drops Liz before falling himself.

The Staten Island ferry splits in half, and Tony takes the suit, leaving Peter with nothing to do except mourn his lost identity and wait.

He asks Liz to homecoming.

Liz's father turns out to be the Vulture.

The Vulture drops a building on him.

The Vulture leaves him for dead, and Peter is forced to claw his way out from under several tons of rubble in a desperate attempt to survive the night before taking to the skies on a hijacked Avengers jet and crashing it on Coney Island.

There's a fight, and all that he can remember is burning and pain and dragging the Vulture out of a fiery inferno before escaping back to his apartment and stitching himself back together, because Tony isn't there to help and May can't ever know. Blood stains the bathroom tiles before he wipes them up with a bottle of bleach. The old suit is marred beyond repair, so Peter is left with nothing.

Tony gives him a new suit. Tony gives him a spot on the Avengers. Peter turns it all down, because he _knows_ he isn't ready. He's made so many mistakes, hurt so many people- he isn't responsible enough. He's starting to doubt that he ever will be.

Tony was right.

_And then Thanos comes_ , _and Peter finds out what it feels like to die._

〄

Tony and the surviving Avengers bring back the dusted, sacrificing one of their own for the whole. Peter comes back in a blaze of pain. Every atom of his body knits itself back together in a long, drawn-out process, and he feels every minute of it.

Strange takes them to the destroyed Compound, hundreds of warriors lined up side-by-side, ready to face the horde of aliens that stands in their way, because _dammit_ , they've just come back. Natasha's sacrifice will not be in vain.

Peter leads the charge beside Tony and Captain America and the people he'd fought only a few years ago, but it wasn't _a few years_ , because he was dead for _five._ That's half a decade. A tenth of fifty years. A twentieth of an entire century.

Everyone else grew and moved on, and the wear is obvious in their faces. Tony's hair is starting to gray at the edges, and if Peter reads him right, he's married to Pepper Potts. Captain America's face is lined and tired. Clint Barton, who he remembers fighting at the airport, looks like a completely different person now.

People are dead. People are crying. There are tearful reunions and breakdowns and sobbing all over the battlefield as the conflict rages on, but Peter isn't paying attention to any of that. No, he's looking for one person.

And he finds him in the middle of the rubble, standing there like he's been waiting.

The hug is the last good thing that Peter can remember.

Because Tony snaps the infinity gauntlet as Peter struggles to get to him, to fight, to save him from the energy that courses through his body. But he's too slow, too weak, and too late.

The arc reactor fizzes out as Peter sobs and Tony's wife- Tony's _widow_ \- tells him that _everything's going to be okay, he can rest, they've won._

Peter knows differently, his heart sinking in his chest as he watches the medics frantically try to revive Tony's body.

_There's no victor when Iron Man is gone._

〄

He wishes he could say that it ends there. That his story has a sad ending, but there's no more hardship, because everything is okay now. The world is back to normal. Mourning is normal, he tells himself. Mourning is okay, and you can mourn for Tony as long as you keep moving. Just like Tony did.

_He never moved on_ _, Peter_ , Miss Potts- Miss Stark- tells him after school. _He did all of this for you._

Tony shouldn't have sacrificed all of that for one kid, especially when Peter learns (in a fit of horror) that, in the five years since he was gone, Tony had a child of his own. A daughter. _Morgan H. Stark._

Pepper and Morgan carry the name of a dead man. Peter is the reason for that.

Life moves like normal for the next two semesters. It takes some time for Peter, Ned, and MJ (who had also blipped- _such a casual name for so much death_ ) to adjust to the fact that children who had been in elementary school when they'd last seen them were now their age and that their classmates were in college. But, as time passes, they try to move on. To move forward.

Peter acts like he's beside them, but he will _always_ be back in 2018, fighting beside Tony and dying underneath him on Titan.

Nevertheless, life is a constantly-moving stream of reality. It can't stop for one person- not when everyone else continues to move. There's too much force pushing it for Peter to stop. 

He pulls himself together, gets straight A's (just like Before), re-joins Decathlon, and sleeps on the ground because he can't bear the Iron Man sheets on his bed (May had never changed his room). Spider-Man even makes a return about two months after the final battle, but it isn't the same anymore.

Peter feels haunted. Not by Tony's ghost, or Ben's ghost, or even a _person_. He feels haunted by the life he could've had, had Thanos never snapped his fingers.

That life is gone.

That life has been gone for _so long_ , and it hurts almost as bad as every one of his fathers' deaths rolled into one. Is he cursed? Is there some kind of hex looming over everyone he's ever seen as a parent? Richard, Mary, Ben, and Tony are dead. Who's next? Are May and Pepper going to die? Is he going to have to bury a _sister_?

He's lost everyone else. Why not?

The decathlon team makes finals. They lose because Peter's brain stops working when they finally get the Chemistry question he's been waiting for and says Tellurium instead of Vibranium. Everyone looks disappointed, but not in him.

Midtown's students and faculty can tell that something happened to him over the blip, even if they don't point it out. They know that something's wrong with Peter Parker.

Flash doesn't even punch him. He just gives him a sympathetic look as he makes his way to the bathroom to have another mental breakdown and offers to sit with him. And Peter, _weak, weak_ Peter, doesn't have the willpower to refuse.

Flash Thompson, the person who made Peter's life hell before everything went to shit, holds him as he sobs in the boys' bathroom and rubs his shoulders when he throws up in an overflowing trash can.

They never mention it again.

_This is the falling action of Peter's story, not because everything is leveling out, but because he is **falling**. Because he can feel himself tumbling into an abyss, and he can't bring himself to try and save himself._

_In the end, he doesn't know if he can._

〄

The day Peter finally crashes and burns starts like any other. He wakes up on the floor of his apartment (the same one from Before) with a blanket tangled in his legs and his shirt wrinkled from a restless night of sleep. Sunshine filters through half-closed blinds, striping the wooden floor with golden light. The globe (that same globe) sits on top of his desk, right next to a picture of four people standing around a baby's cradle.

He knows two of them.

One is alive.

The door is closed, but Peter's enhanced senses reach far beyond wood and paint. He can hear someone- May, probably, or Happy if he decided to stay the night (again)- bustling around the kitchen. A clatter of pans makes him wonder if they're _trying_ to wake him up.

It's easier than coming in and shaking him, considering how Peter tends to struggle when people touch him if he's vulnerable. They'd learned that lesson the hard way after the blip when Peter had nearly knocked May unconscious.

Another pan falls, and it's now clear that they're trying to wake him up, because voices rise and fall like waves. There are more than two people outside his door; he counts three different voices. Two male, one female, all unclear.

Who in the world-?

Peter gets dressed quickly, pulling on a rumpled pair of jeans and the _I survived my trip to New York_ shirt that Tony had bought him after the ferry incident. He runs his fingers through his hair, leaving it standing on end, and takes a deep breath.

Interactions aren't easy anymore. _Leaving his room isn't easy anymore_.

But, nevertheless, it has to be done.

He steps out and freezes in his tracks, heart stopping in his tracks, eyes wide, breathing quick, because _it has to be a dream. He can't have woken up_.

Sitting on the couch in their small living room, decked out in an Armani suit and a pair of sunglasses (even though he's inside and doesn't need them), is Tony Stark.

There's a dead man on the Parker couch.

Tony seems to catch Peter's eye just as Peter sees him and freezes in just the same way, mouth slightly agape. There's a blue coffee cup in his hand, still steaming, and even though he stops moving, it doesn't.

The mug falls as if in slow motion. Peter tracks it all the way to the floor, preparing for the crash to assault his senses, bracing for impact, and when it finally shatters against the floor, he flinches so hard he nearly falls.

May, by the sink, and Happy, standing next to her, both move to clean up the spill, but Peter stays in the doorway of his room and _stares._

He definitely hasn't woken up yet. Is it a possibility that the trauma is starting to spill from his nightmares to his waking life? Maybe he's hallucinating. He hasn't been doing much sleeping yet, anyway- most of the time he spends in his room is taken up by crying and anger and sitting there and pretending like he doesn't exist.

That's it. He's going insane. Whatever's going on in front of him is nothing but an illusion- a hallucination. Not-Tony isn't really there, he's just a product of wishful thinking and too many hours spent daydreaming.

Peter closes his eyes tightly against the stinging of his eyes before opening them again, fully expecting Not-Tony to have disappeared. But, no, he's still there. Sitting on the couch with a growing puddle of coffee at his feet.

"May?" Peter says, hating the way his voice cracks. " _May_ , I need to see a therapist."

The tears spill over as Not-Tony raises a hand to his mouth and pushes his sunglasses to his forehead, revealing horrified eyes. They're exactly like the real Tony's had looked- in fact, everything about Not-Tony is exactly the same as real Tony.

_It's not him_.

When the hallucination doesn't disappear, something in Peter breaks. He collapses to his knees, sobbing, because _this is all too much_. Why won't his mind leave him alone? Why won't the author of his story just _leave him alone_?

"M-May," he chokes out, covering his eyes with his hands and curling into a shaking ball on the floor. "May, _he's not here, he's not here, he's not here._ I'm going _insane, May._ " 

It really feels like he is.

"I need a th-therapist _, please_ , I need to t-t-talk to _someone-_ I'm _seeing him_. _I'm seeing him and I d-don't know wh-why."_

Through a haze of tears, Peter sees Not-Tony stand, pushing himself shakily up from the couch and stepping around the shards of the coffee cup before moving toward him. He doesn't think, just _panics_ , because _the hallucination is getting worse and he doesn't know what does he do what does he do what does he do-_

He's halfway up the wall before he can blink, but his muscle control is lacking, his focus is failing, and he tumbles back to the ground just as quickly. Peter doesn't even try to catch himself, just falls and _stays there_ , sobbing as new bruises form all over his chest and back and arms and splinters dig into his palms.

_Why is he in so much pain? Why is he always hurting_ _?_

"Wh-why won't they just leave me alone?" He asks, cursing the broken edge of his voice. "Th-they n-n-never go away, May."

But it isn't a shell-shocked May who answers, but a voice Peter never thought he would hear again.

"Maybe they don't," Tony says, his voice teary but somehow joyful, "but neither will I, kid."

And right there, on the floor of an apartment in a gutted city, the real Tony Stark gathers Peter up in his warm, solid, _real_ arms and holds him, rocking him back and forth.

They cry, but they cry together.

_Because Iron Man will never die. And as long as Iron Man stands, so will Peter Parker. No matter how hard it gets._


End file.
